L ong QT syndrome causes sudden unexpected death through rapid ventricular tachycardia (‘‘torsades de pointes’’) leading to ventricular fibrillation (see figs 1 and 2). 2 The postmortem examination reveals no cause for the death. These characteristics make long QT syndrome a plausible cause of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), and many research efforts have been made to investigate a possibl...

Probucol administration of 4 weeks produced torsades de pointes associated with exacerbated QT interval prolongation in a 36-year-old woman with Romano-Ward syndrome. With discontinuance of probucol, the QT interval corrected for rate shortened from 620 msec to 500 msec and ventricular ectopic beats disappeared completely. Although probucol is known to prolong the QT interval, associated ventri...

Two heritable syndromes possibly genotypically related and manifesting prolonged QT (or QU) interval and TU wave changes, sinus bradycardia, syncopal attacks, ventricular arrhythmias, and frequently sudden death, are recognized respectively with (Jervell and Lange-Nielsen, 1957) and without (Romano, Gemme, and Pongiglione, I963; Ward, I964) profound childhood perceptive deafness. We report here...

(WHO) issued a global alert regarding severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in Vietnam, Hong Kong, and China's Guangdong Province. Three days later, for the first time in its history , WHO recommended postponing nonessential travel to the affected areas and screening airline passengers (1). These initiatives, together with the awareness of the modes transmission of the coronavirus associated...

BACKGROUND In congenital long-QT syndrome, age, sex, and genotype have been associated with cardiac events, but their effect on the trend in QTc interval has never been established. We, therefore, aimed to assess the effect of age and sex on the QTc interval in children and adolescents with type 1 (LQT1) and type 2 (LQT2) long-QT syndrome. METHODS AND RESULTS QTc intervals of 12-lead resting ...

BACKGROUND Experimental studies suggest that the interval between peak and end of T wave (Tpe) in transmural ECGs reflects transmural dispersion of repolarization (TDR), which is amplified by beta-adrenergic stimulation in the LQT1 model. In 82 patients with genetically identified long-QT syndrome (LQTS) and 33 control subjects, we examined T-wave morphology and various parameters for repolariz...